Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Breaking A Habit Is Easy

Changing a well ingrained habit is a challenge, but it can be done. Because your brain has created such a well established pattern in your mind, it won't let go of any habit easily. Your mind will use every trick in the book to try and get you back on the path of the habit you told it to create.

Remember, your mind is only doing what you told it to do and like any good servant it keeps trying to do the job until it's done. Your mind will try a lot of ways to get you to get back on track in the habit you created.

Here are just a few of those ways:

The first couple of days your mind will not notice the missing habit very much.

After a couple of days you will begin to think about going back, but you'll be able to override the thought fairly easy at this point.

After 3 or 4 days, you'll start questioning the wisdom of your choice. You'll begin asking yourself, is this really worth the effort?

By 5 or 6 days your mind will get even more creative. You'll start telling yourself that I don't really need to do this right now, why don't I just do it in the future? You'll be very tempted to cheat but you know that by cheating you will end up defeated so you stick it out.

After about a week, you will begin to find reasons to put the change off. There will be a party, you'll go out to dinner or even the fact that it's Friday night and just doing it this once won't hurt. I can start up again on Monday because there's no point trying to do it the rest of the weekend; after all, what are weekends for?

All of these temptations, logic, rationalizing and reasons are just your mind's way of trying to force you to do what you told it you wanted it to do. Your mind isn't stupid, it's going to get very creative.

The only way to change this whole picture is by doing three things:

Educate yourself about how habits are formed and the tricks your mind will use.

Maintain your focus. If you begin to think less and less about the habit change you are trying to make, your mind will exploit this weakness. You must continually remind yourself or be reminded of the habit you're trying to change during the entire 30 to 60 days it will take to permanently change the habit.

Only take on a small change at one time. If the change you're trying to make is fairly small and easy, you can overcome the resistance of your mind. If you take on too much, you will simply give in and your subconscious mind will win.

Always be aware that your mind is only doing what you told it to do for many years and that you're trying to reprogram it to do something else. Small simple changes to habits is how you break a habit the easy way and offers the best chance for success.

If you don't change your habits, your habits will make sure you never change.

My name is Larry Allen and I spent the last three years researching and analyzing why diets and exercise programs don't work to lose weight and keep it off. I have developed an alternative that does. "It's Just A Habit" is a bold, new, simple solution to permanent weight loss. It shows how by developing 4 simple habits you can get dramatic results that are not achievable through diet and exercise alone. No diet and exercise plans, no pills, no hype and no phony promises. It's simple, it's easy and it works.

Visit our website at http://ItsJustAHabit.com and discover why you haven't been able to lose weight permanently and what you can do about it. You can also join our free forum to talk about how habits rule our lives.